Really, really want Oblivion. I mean, look at it. It is achingly beautiful.
I love having an RPG I can really pour the hours into. I get the Pokemon games - even in the face of their JRPG combat and recent unimaginativeness. Haven't found any good DS RPGs in a while, though. Can anyone recommend?

Oblivion is a very nice looking game, had it since its release and still not got round to completing it. Got the expansions too and they are not bad either. Terry is a fan of Oblivion too.

Fallout 3 comes from the same stable and is equally impressive to look at but in a different way. I'd say its slightly harder but more real if thats possible. Best in-game music ever .If you've not played it or can't, think 40's/50's crooners (Cole Porter) in a nuclear wasteland (Washington to be exact). Something very odd about singing along to it while exploring The National Library.

Dragon Age: Origins is the best I've played so far this past year, I wasn't sure I would like it but I can't find a problem with any of it (which is unusual)

Any fan of RPG's should check out anything that Bioware (developer) has had a hand in. They did Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic (Star wars) and Baldurs Gate (D&D) and also Jade Empire which I've not played yet.

Morrowind & Deus Ex are still playable today despite their age and looks.

I'm not a fan of Final Fantasy, I found it too linear and turn-based combat is not a good thing unless its a board game

The Zelda series (especially the older 2D ones) appear on the surface as RPGs, but they are more readily classed as adventure games. There is no leveling up and the games typically follow a very tight storyline. Regardless, it is an excellent series.

Quark wrote:Ah yes, Fallout 3. I've had an eye on it too, but it's a tad too high for my system. Looks truly epic, however.

I upgraded my system so I could play it. This proved to be a good move as the game is truly epic with sooo many sidequests and locations to discover without even including the add on packs. It does have a few irritating, but minor, glitches however. Its definitely my favourite game with a large degree of re-playability (due to style of character play/skill choice etc.). The only real whinge I have is the level cap (20, or 30 with expansion packs) meaning that you max out before completing the entire game world!

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

But it's first person sword combat! Have you ever played Thief? Do you know how immersive that is?
I mean, sure, it's harder to tell what'd going on sometimes, but on the upside, it makes you a great deal more wary when someone's preparing to shove a sword through your monitor

I'm guessing you mean theif class and not another game. I played thief and had lots of fun emptying houses in the middle of the night ,except when one guard caught me and I resisted arrest so he attacked.I retaliated and killed him,didn't want to but he wouldn't let me run away.

“We are all in the gutter,but some of us are looking at the stars.”- Oscar Wilde

One piece of advice for anyone buying Oblivion:- Get ready to do a lot, and I mean a lot of walking around. Oh sure, you can fast travel, but the only way to increase your levels is to repeat actions, such as running, jumping, sneaking, hitting things with your sword, casting spells etc... This is fine at the very early levels, you're always getting little notifications, cheerily telling you "Your Athletics skill has increased", but by the time your level gets into double figures, those messages are fewer and farther between.

Athletics is a vital stat, it determines fatigue, which determines how much damage you do in combat. Naturally enough, you'll want to max this out as soon as possible. However, doing so isn't as easy as you might hope. To begin with, you'll simply run between towns, admiring the scenery and wishing you could step into such a lush and vivid landscape. Soon however, the novelty wears off and you begin to find yourself thinking things like "Oh look, another bloody tree. Just like the other three million I ran past on my way to this point, which is only one third through my actual journey from Leyawin to Bravil." Then, you begin to find your own head bobbing up and down in the rhythm of the screen movement. Then you find yourself composing US military style marching cadence in time to the forlorn and lonely slapping of your characters feet as you trudge from one town to the next, starved of all human contact...

I don't know but it's been said,
(I don't know but it's been said)
I want the lead programmer dead!
(I want the lead programmer dead!)
Sound off!

ONE TWO!

Pro-grammer!

SCREW! YOU!"

When you realise you're doing this out loud and your spouse is staring at you with fear in her eyes, you'll figure out a new tactic for the athletics boost. "Eureka!" you'll exclaim, startling your already nervous spouse into spilling tea on her favourite Triple H t-shirt, "I'll just fast travel between towns, but when I'm in town, I'll progress everywhere in sort of moon-man-bunny-hop, just like Buzz Aldrin. Buzz Aldrin's cool, he punches morons in the face! If we ever have a son I'm calling him Buzz." Your spouse may or may not develop a habit of sitting with a heavy object always within arm's reach at this point. Anway, back to the moon-man-bunny-hopping idea. You'll enter town, you'll travel everywhere in a sort of frenetic, Tiggerish bounce. You'll probably even sing the Tigger song at first, it is awfully jaunty.

Soon though, the doubts will begin to creep in. "Will all of this pressing of the jump button ruin my joypad/keyboard?", "Am I actually moving slower, now that I'm jumping everywhere?", "What must these poor people I'm talking to think? They're placing the future of the entire world into the hands of a person who jumps up and down on the spot while they talk to him", I mean imagine how you would react, if you were talking to someone who jumped and down while you were talking to them. They're nodding gravely and taking in everything you say, but bouncing up and down like the front row at a Green Day concert while they do it... After that, you'll see doubt and suspicion in the eyes of everyone who looks at your character. NPC dialogues will take on a horrible subtext for you. When they speak to each other, saying things like "Did you hear about the hero of Kvatch?" you'll suspect that whenever you're out of earshot, they add "You know who I mean, that moron who's always jumping up and down". You already know everyone hates you, because no matter how many good deeds you perform, no matter how many lives you transform for the better, if your gaze lingers on something for even a microsecond, someone will snarl "Don't even think about stealing that!", or even worse, you knock something off a shelf in a shop, you conscientiously try to pick it up and put it back and they attack you as a thief. You'll run away from them to avoid getting into a killing argument only to hear "STOP RIGHT THERE CRIMINAL SCUM!" and a guard arrests you for the heinous crime of being a jumping loon who knocked a vase over. Trust me, you'll learn to hate that sound almost as much as the random battle sound on Final Fantasy VII.

Ahem!

As the above may tell you, I've spent rather a lot of time playing Oblivion. I'm getting Dragon Age: Origins in a couple of weeks, so I'll soon be able to add romantic angst to my gaming neuroses. I'm kind of worried about that, since I've only recently stopped grieving for Aeris, who died in 1998. I went with her on the roller-coaster in the Golden Saucer! If only I'd gone with Tifa, I might not have hurt so much.

Brilliant! I've spent many hours in both Morrowind and Oblivion jumping around and running everywhere. I have to admit I got bored of it though and used the editor to make myself a pair of boots that increased those stats (and put them in a shop so I had to save a small fortune in order to buy them....took me days as I forgot which shop I put them into)

Romantic angst in Dragon Age....just wait (I had no favourites in my party, you'll see what I mean by that when you play it) got the expansion sitting next to me, about to install...I may be some time

It's not so much the running around in Oblivion (I've played WoW since vanilla and I'm more than used to running around huge worlds ), I just find the controls and interface clunky. I think it might be because I prefer to use my keyboard more than my mouse when PC gaming. Meh, I dunno.